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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-11-14)
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There are a couple of people here on Gemini who are like…
1. The entire human worldview is an illusion and there’s really no “self”
2. Therefore it’s pointless to try to fight climate change
I think that first point has a lot of merit. I say it all the time even though I’m the world’s crappiest Bodhisattva.
We’re all in it together. It’s 1🌏1♥︎. No getting around that. When I hurt other people I’m hurting the same humanity that I’m supposed to be a part of.
I think the conclusion, the jump to the second point, is wack.
If someone is really that utterly enlightened and non-attached to the dust of the world that they’re living off scraps naked in a cardboard box 24/7, they’re like “I don’t need jeans because the world’s an illusion”, “I don’t need to tie my shoes because the world’s an illusion”, that’s awesome, but even Diogenes wanted sleep and food.
And fixing climate change is even more foundational, even more important than sleep and food. To fucking have a planet to even live on is like step zero on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Not psychologically, obviously. We’re seeing how politicians, corporations, and citizens all keep treating the climate as if it were the least important thing even though it’s the absolute core problem of our time.
Hitchens and the Myth of Socrates
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - Wikipedia
Here is Pauline Kael again:
It is like the old nonsense that man is what differentiates him from the other animals - which is usually said to be his soul or his mind or his ability to transmit information from one generation to another, etc. But man is also what he shares with the other animals. And if you try to reduce him to some supposed quality that he alone has, you get an absurdly distorted view of man. And the truth is, as we learn more about animals and about man, the less we are sure about what differentiates him from other animals, or if it’s so very important.